


dream a little dream of me

by begforyourmercy



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Character Death In Dream, Force Soulmates, Force Visions, Kylux - Freeform, M/M, Marriage, Mpreg, Multiple Universes Colliding, brief mention of MPreg
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-24 04:05:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17697332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/begforyourmercy/pseuds/begforyourmercy
Summary: "Waking up from these dreams always feels like walking away from a home you’ve built with your own two hands: empty, cold, missing pieces you thought would never fall out."Kylo Ren loves his General - but only when he's asleep.





	dream a little dream of me

**Author's Note:**

> this idea blindsided me and i literally couldn't think straight until i'd written ten pages of it. hope you guys enjoy it, because i'm probably still crying over it.
> 
> \- mercy

The first time it happens, he doesn’t know he’s asleep.

 

Kylo Ren is standing in a field, looking out toward a bright blue horizon. There is a sun high above him, radiating a deep warmth that contrasts with the cold breeze nipping at the exposed skin of his hands and face. The knee-deep grass of the field sways in the wind and hits against his legs in repetition: _scratch, scratch, scratch_ , never ceasing. Not far off, his ears pick up the sound of water: waves from a sea, rushing in to tumble over one another as they meet with the soft earth that connects land to ocean. He sees pale sand, laying somewhere far beyond where the grass comes to an end. He doesn’t know this place, or how he got here, but it all feels eerily familiar. Like he’s been here before.

 

The grass behind him rustles, as if something is walking through it. Kylo turns quickly, worried he’s being snuck up on by some unseen enemy. Who he finds instead is more of a shock.

 

It’s General Hux - but not as Kylo knows him. This Hux is out of uniform, wearing soft robes of light grey and blue. His red hair is left undone; his pale skin exposed at the collar and hands. The harsh sunlight nearly washes him out, and his eyes squint against it as he looks up at Kylo, seemingly just as confused. There is a smattering of freckles splashed across the bridge of his nose.

 

“Ben,” Hux says, sounding so young - teenage, if only just. “What are you doing out here?”

 

If Kylo knew where here was, then maybe he could say. But he doesn’t. He looks around again, this time more hungry for details, head swiveling wildly around until he latches onto something solid. There’s a cluster of houses in the distance: small, made of stone, smoke coming from the chimneys. On the wind, Kylo hears the faintest chime of laughter emanate from them.

 

“Come on.” Hux reaches out a hand, giving Kylo’s sleeve a little tug. “Let’s go back to the others.”

 

When Hux turns around, Kylo sees a padawan braid at the nape of his neck.

 

And then, he wakes up. The world around him is dark instead of sunlit; the walls are slate-grey in the dim glow of artificial light, and somewhere nearby he hears not the sea, but soft beeps of the ship’s electronic inner workings carrying on through the night shift. He’s on the Finalizer, in his room, in his bed. There’s no field or bright blue sky or houses with chimneys. There’s no Hux.

 

But it felt so _real_ \- the grass, the sunlight. The freckles over milky skin.

 

“It’s just a dream,” he tells himself, rolling over onto his side. He lays his head down, hoping to never feel so lost or out of place like this again.

 

\-----

 

The second time, he’s almost convinced it’s real, because he knows exactly where he is.

 

Kylo’s eyes open to a glimpse of hell. He’s in the dark, and his heart is pounding, adrenaline coursing through his veins at a million parsecs an hour. A flickering flash of red from above illuminates his surroundings - a hallway deep in the belly of the Finalizer, but desecrated nearly beyond recognition, its walls ripped and torn open in long, glowing slashes. Through the gaping holes, the ship’s wiring sparks and burns, throwing acrid smoke into the air that is bitter to breathe and stinging to the eyes. The tangy taste of copper in the air suggests blood has been spilled; Kylo only has to glance at the hallway behind him for a moment to see it’s strewn with the bodies of officers and stormtroopers alike. He’s the only living thing left here, left standing after some great calamity arrived, rupturing and imploding like a dying star.

 

And then he hears movement, from the hallway far in front of him. Footsteps resounding off the marred walls, careful and slow clicks padding across the bloodied floor. Kylo knows those steps - hears them show up on the bridge every day. Precise, measured, even when in crisis.

 

Hux appears at the other end. He lights up red with every flash: vibrant, present, _real_.

 

“It was you,” he gasps out, breathing hard, body trembling with just as much adrenaline as Kylo feels in his own form. His greatcoat is shredded and hanging, his blaster in his shaking hand. “You - _you_ did this.”

 

Kylo doesn’t know what’s happened here, or if it really was his own hands that wrought the destruction he sees before him. But the Finalizer destroyed, the crew murdered - why would it be him? But he has no memory to deny it. It’s as if he’s been dropped into the scene from above, shoved through a door without any explanation as it slams shut behind him. Hux inches ever closer down the hallway toward him, the red emergency light above them both tracing his steps in intermittent flashes: _bright, dark, bright, dark, bright_. Closer and closer, until he stops dead about ten feet away.

 

Hux swallows hard, the blaster wobbling slightly as he keeps it trained on Kylo’s chest. Now that he’s close, Kylo can see one side of his face is badly bruised - the other, smeared with blood. “How could you?” he chokes out, and the hurt in his voice, the sheer _heartbreak_ , makes Kylo’s breath stick in his throat.

 

Kylo raises his hands, only now seeing the lightsaber clutched in one of them.

 

Hux is crying when he pulls the trigger.

 

Kylo hears the shot - and again, wakes up. He’s in his bedroom once more, the Finalizer around him whole and quiet in the depths of her sleep cycle. The sheets under him are damp with sweat, blankets cloying as they cling to his soaked skin. He’s gasping for air, but the more he takes into his lungs, the more he feels like he’s suffocating - he puts a hand to his chest, feeling for a bullet hole, but his fingertips come away clean of blood. He’s unscathed, but feeling as if he’d just cheated death.

 

He doesn’t fall back asleep until the night cycle is nearly over.

 

\-----

 

Ren begins staving off sleep, heart filled with fear every time his eyes start to close.

 

If they were just dreams - and he has the slightest suspicion that there’s something more to them, something heavy and ancient and unknowable that his gut tells him he shouldn’t meddle with - then he wouldn’t feel any need to worry. He could rationalize it, tuck away the thoughts and images running rampant inside his head; compartmentalize it like he did with every other lingering want or need that didn’t serve an immediate purpose.

 

But he can’t. Because they don’t feel like dreams - they feel more like _memories_ , fuzzy and distant, as if they’re things he lived through eons ago. Snippets of lifetimes past that he can’t remember the whole of, but can pick and poke at little fragments of to piece together what might have happened.

 

It’s foolish to dwell on them, Kylo knows that much. No matter what they are - dreams, strange premonitions, wild fixations of his subconscious that he couldn’t hope to interpret the meaning of - they’re not going to help him become stronger in the Force. They’re all but useless to him.

 

But they’re making him look at a certain stern, cold-on-the-surface general in a different light, and he doesn’t know how to stop it.

 

\-----

 

Hux - the real Hux, the one that exists outside of his head - confronts him one day.

 

“You’re slacking, Ren,” he says quite bluntly, smacking a datapad down on the table of the conference room he’d nearly dragged Kylo into. He powers the pad up and begins running through pages upon pages of reports, most of them incomplete in some way, others hardly even touched. Kylo already knows they’re his reports, left undone in his current state of mania. “None of these are filed, all of them are incomplete - you haven’t debriefed a single mission or detailed an assignment in weeks. I understand that _some of us_ -” Hux now flicks his eyes up to glare at Kylo, but all Kylo can see is those green irises he’s been looking into night after night after night, “get special treatment around here, but no one is above their designated responsibilities. Especially not you.”

 

Kylo is barely present to catch whatever verbal attack Hux is throwing his way. He’d fallen asleep for less than an hour the night before, seeing something so wildly vivid and real that he woke himself back up for fear of finding out how it continued to unfold. In this dream, he and Hux were in a compromised shuttle hurtling straight toward a planet. There was no way to stop it; they were doomed to crash into the ground and go out in a blaze when the ship exploded on impact. They would die, violently, pitilessly. Dream-Hux’s hands were cold on Kylo’s skin as he clung to him, eyes dripping tears as he pleaded _I don’t want to die I don’t want to die I’m not ready I love you_ **_I love you_ ** _-_

 

“Are you even listening to me?” the real Hux quips, green eyes flashing with fire.

 

Kylo swallows. He nods, though it’s untrue - his ears were too filled with dream-Hux’s screams replaying over and over again to receive any more new sounds. The haunting _I love you_ won’t climb out from under his skin. Still, Kylo nods again, keeping a flat affect as if all was well.

 

But the other man doesn’t seem convinced. He watches Kylo with wary eyes, unblinking as he weighed his suspicions  “Ren,” Hux says carefully, and Kylo nearly shivers at the familiar way his name sounds coming out of Hux’s mouth. “You look pale. Are you alright?”

 

It takes everything he has in him to not lie on the spot and say yes. It would be so easy to do: with just a wave of his hand, he could convince the other man through the Force that y _es, I’m perfectly fine, now get back to work, General_. But the mere thought of being alone in his knowledge that something strange was at work, continually throwing him into the dream realm with only Hux as his companion, made him feel like he was about to rip apart from the inside out. He couldn’t walk free of this room without knowing if this meant something significant or if he was just going insane.

 

“Tell me, General,” Kylo says instead, “what do you dream about?”

 

Hux’s brow furrows, and he lets out a stunned laugh that hides no hints to how absurd he finds this moment in time. “What?” he asks, utterly baffled.

 

“When you dream,” Kylo continues, knowing he’s coming across as nothing more than a madman by talking about dreams with a man who thrives on practicality and reason, but unable to stop himself now that his mouth has been opened, “do you ever see things that could never happen? Lives that are impossible to live, events that could never take place. But yet… regardless of circumstance... you see them unfold anyway?”

 

A strange expression makes its way across Hux’s face, as if he almost knows what Kylo is getting at here - as if he’s trying to recall some interred memory from the deeply-dug dens of his mind. He freezes, mouth open, eyes flicking back and forth as he momentarily gets lost inside his head. Hope wells up inside Kylo’s chest as he watches it happen, feeling so close to being understood that it makes his skin crawl and heart begin to pound.

 

But in the end, Hux just laughs at him, shaking his head as if to cast away the nonsense he’s just heard. “You Force-users are karking mad,” he scoffs, rolling his eyes and stepping away from the conference table he’d been leaning over. Taking up the datapad, he gives it a few angry shakes with his hand before setting it back down and sliding it over the smooth glass surface of the table, until it comes to rest right in front of Kylo. “Fix those. Now, if possible. Maybe I’ll humor your mad ramblings once you’ve actually done your share of the work.”

 

Hux then makes to leave, leaving Kylo standing there, awkward and in a daze. But before he’s completely out the door, he turns back, throwing Kylo another strange look - this one less wondering, and more complete bewilderment, as if there’s something deeper that he’s fixating on. “Or maybe take a nap first, Ren,” he decides to tack on as he departs. “You look like you need it.”

 

\-----

 

The visions come every night, every time he lays his head down and shuts his eyes. He’s lived more lives now than he could possibly count; he’s seen himself young and old and every phase in between within a matter of mere weeks. In every last one of them, Hux seems to follow suit, appearing as a child or aged or exactly as he is now alongside him. The one thing he never is in these dreams, is absent.

 

What’s even stranger? The roles he seems to play when he appears. Childhood companion or despised enemy; fellow fugitive or partner-in-crime. Always there, as if tied on the end of an invisible string - never the same exact scenario twice, but some of them sharing the same blueprints. Some roles come back to haunt him, as if knowing they’re the ones that get under his skin the most.

 

The most common to come back is the role of lover. A hand to hold, a warm body to embrace. He’s seen every inch of Hux’s moon-pale skin in these dreams - counted his freckles and kissed his collarbones and traced the bruises his hands left behind. He’s lived in the hollow space between his legs and felt the pure warmth of him in the dead of night. They’ve run away from the First Order together, they’ve been stuck in a Resistance cell side by side, they’ve had sleepy days lying in bed together on some remote Outer Rim planet. They’ve married in secret and carried about their day jobs without any of their subordinates ever finding out. They’ve met by chance as ordinary civilians, writing a softer love story than Kylo could ever even try to imagine was possible. They’ve killed for each other, they’ve died for each other. He dreams a new love affair every night without fail.

 

What concerns Kylo the most is this: while it’s unnerving to find himself kissing Hux night after night, it also seems to be the most natural feeling one of them all. Waking up from these dreams always feels like walking away from a home you’ve built with your own two hands: empty, cold, missing pieces you thought would never fall out.

 

Kylo can no longer carry on as if it’s not happening. He mulls these dreams over, rolling them back and forth on his tongue like a bitter pill he can’t seem to choke down. In these visions, one thing is becoming alarmingly clear: Hux is important to him, somehow. Why else would he appear alongside Kylo every time without fail?

 

But important, _why_? And why _Hux_?

 

He’d sworn himself off the needs of the flesh years and years ago - it only stands in the way of his goal to grow stronger in the Dark Side, an obstacle for which he had no time to waste on maneuvering around. But what, then?

 

So he searches for an answer. Accessing the First Order archives - they keep everything they can get their hands on, even if they don’t know what half of it means - or tossing a few credits to some seedy contacts who may deal in the areas that files and data don’t reach are where he starts first. When those routes of information turn up nothing, he begins to get desperate; seeking out others who are strong in the Force would only bring suspicion and exposure, so he gives up on that thought almost as soon as it forms.

 

He meets strange spiritualists on planetside missions to ask if he’s been cursed; he seeks out superstitious privateers in deep space to question them about premonitions. _Can you interpret dreams?_ he longs to scream to anyone who will listen, even if anyone is the dark void of the unfeeling universe.

 

The answer eludes him. But he’s still desperate to know.

 

He’s desperate to sleep again, just so he can try and solve the puzzle, crack the code. At least that’s what he tells himself, as he slips into another dream of Hux in his arms.

 

\-----

 

The last dream he has gives him his answer. It’s also the one that completely ruins him.

 

Early in the morning,  he arrives. The sun is peaking over a distant hill, casting dim rays through the tiny grey-washed house’s half-shaded windows. There are dust particles floating in the air, disappearing and rematerializing once the light hits them; the little room before him bears nothing but a simple table strewn with paper and cloth, with trinkets and dishes and the things people collect when they settle into simplicity. A home, well-lived in and well-loved.

 

There are letters, pages yellowed and folded, on the table. The gently-sloped handwriting is his first unmistakable sign of Hux. Kylo reaches out to pick one up and catches another: a wedding band around his finger, simple and thin and glinting dimly in the growing light. _Lovers again,_ Kylo thinks. _Lovers, spouses._ He’s home again.

 

And then, a tiny cry breaks through the quiet air.

 

His heart already on the floor in pieces, Kylo follows it through the door.

 

Of all the places that Kylo has found Hux, this one is the one that leaves him completely speechless. He stops in the doorframe, too awestruck to move another step inward.

 

The early morning light falls on Hux as he rests on a small grey couch, tucked up against the arm of it with his feet curled under him. He is bathed in the ethereal grey-white glow of the sun; his skin angelically pale to the point of near-translucence. Like in many other dreams, his hair is undone, left loose and soft with strands falling down in front of his eyes. He is thinner, and a bit younger than Kylo knows him - but he is still a little freckled on his face, still bird-boned and long-limbed as ever. He is still his Hux, in all the ways that count.

 

In his arms is a newborn, tiny and pink and swaddled in a pale blue blanket. Wisps of dark hair poke out from the bundle; a tiny hand curls around Hux’s finger, both of them thin and delicate.

 

“Shh, darling, it’s alright,” Hux whispers, so tenderly, so softly, to their child.

 

Kylo can’t even breathe. _Lovers_ , he had come to know. _Spouses_ was becoming familiar. But _parents_ left his mouth dry and his knees suddenly weak.

 

This dream Hux, tired but softened in a way that makes Kylo ache to kiss him breathless, looks up at him and offers an exhausted smile. The fragile little thing in his arms fusses, and Hux shifts until the newborn is laying on his chest, calming the moment its cheek is flush against the exposed skin of his chest. Hux soothes it with gentle kisses atop its head and a hand - a hand with a ring matching Kylo’s - stroking down the length of its back.

 

“What’s wrong, love?” he asks Kylo, voice quiet and kind. “Can’t sleep?”

 

Kylo is thrown out of the dream this time, kicked back out the door before he can get a taste of what this life would have been like. Because now he knows for sure that these are not _dreams_ , these are _lives_ \- lives that he could have lived, lives that he _has lived_ , just not the him that exists right here, right now. These are the lives of every Kylo Ren - _every Ben Solo_ \- there has ever been, ever is, ever will be, and ever could be, in all of space and time. These are window panes into which he is allowed to peer, to stare at with such longing and aching and loneliness, but never have the right to possess. Because his own reality, his own universe, is the one where he does not have the one whom his soul loves.

 

He finds himself on the floor, not in shock, not in confusion, but in a fit of wretched weeping. He screams his sorrows until his throat raws, until his lungs threaten to cave. He pounds fists and tears at hair and breaks everything within reach until his knuckles are raw and there’s blood on the carpet. He exhales sorrow, because there’s too much of it to let sit inside himself. Because he was _wrong_ , and now he’s paying for it.

 

The answer he sought is staring him in the face - it was this entire time, he was just too foolish to see it - but he has no strength left to meet its eyes. It was never about importance - never about solving a puzzle, cracking a code, completing a mission. It was never about relation, about alliance, about closeness. It is, and has always been, about love. Unearthly, fated love. The universe has been known to give some lucky souls their other half - but not every soul. Not every universe.

 

Kylo Ren - Ben Solo - _he_ loves Hux. He loves him, without choice, without question. But in this life, he doesn’t ever get the chance to show it.

 

Kylo Ren does not sleep again that night. He lies awake to keep the dreams at bay.

 

\-----

 

He sleeps again some nights later. When nothing happens but a few hours of blissful blackness, he knows his punishment is finally over.

 

But oh, does he feel rotten, as if every part of his insides is decaying while he lives and breathes. He is hanging on by a thread of sanity that if he were to slip up or let go of, would be plunged into a pit of complete madness that there was no hope of ever crawling back out of. He avoids everyone at all costs, too distraught and unhinged for a long time to even speak to another being - the cracks in his facade are visible even when hidden behind his mask. Hux, he evades with every ounce of his strength. With the wounds on his psyche this fresh and gaping, there was no way Kylo could face the would-be love of his life and pretend that the only thing he felt for him was disdain and irritation.

 

Strangely enough, as days roll on with Kylo Ren neglecting his every task and mission, Hux doesn’t seek him out. It was not uncommon for Kylo to ignore Hux’s orders, thus making it also not uncommon for Hux to charge after him, red-faced and fuming at the slightest inclination that Kylo would dare disrespect his authority. Their rows were frequent and famously volatile. Kylo expects the worst after this long of neglect, to open the door to his quarters one day and find Hux’s blaster already aimed at his forehead.

 

But Hux does not come for him.

 

After days upon days, Kylo finds the willpower to finally make an appearance on the bridge. His world has been tipped on its side, there was no denying that; but wallowing and languishing would do nothing to help the world right itself. To do that, he had to get up and carry on, even if it meant having to cling to the edges and crawl on the floor as if he were scaling a mountain. Coming back from this was not easy, but it would only get harder the further he sunk into the depths of it.

 

So he goes to the bridge, without his mask. His face shows his exhaustion, the skin under his eyes dark and sagging, cheeks sallow and pale. He can’t find it in him to care. It’s of no consequence what the crew of the Finalizer think of his looks - hells, it isn’t even of consequence what Hux thinks, should he see him today. This Hux won’t feel for him the way that the others did. They won’t kiss him sweetly, call him _love_ , fall asleep while wrapped up in Kylo’s arms. So why should he care what he thinks?

 

_Because you love him,_ his mind whispers. He ignores it.

 

Kylo steps onto the bridge. The crew nearby quickly stands to greet him, but before he can let them catch him up to speed on what he’s missed, he dismisses them with a wave of his hand. He’s not ready for a briefing yet, he says - just give him a minute, let him get his bearings. It’s not like him to be this polite with those below his rank, so the crew members exchange nervous looks, but nod, and return to their positions.

 

Kylo feels eyes on him. Looking up, he sees Hux across the room.

 

He steels for the screaming fit. Any moment now, the man will come charging across the floor, shaking a fist and screaming about how _useless_ and _disloyal_ and _vile_ Kylo is, about how much of the weight he’s had to unfairly pull himself. He’ll rage about sleepless nights and hair falling out from stress because of this blatant show of disobedience. But instead of screaming back - instead of choking Hux out with the Force and flinging him into a wall to show him how outmatched he truly is - he knows he won’t be able to say a damn thing. Kylo will sit there and take it all, thinking of his own many nights spent without sleep, of his inability to cope with the crushing reality of the universe he dwells within, and will keep every single bit of it to himself. The only time his lips will part will be to tell Hux he’s sorry, that he’ll do better.

 

_Because he loves him_. He can’t have him, but he can’t help loving him. So he waits, almost patiently, for Hux to swoop in and seethe with pent-up rage.

 

But he doesn’t.

 

Hux’s eyes linger for only a heartbeat more, and then he looks away.

 

\-----

 

They spend their full shifts drifting away from each other: Hux on one side of the room, overseeing the bridge as normal while Kylo is on the other side, receiving briefing comms from the First Order’s web of intelligence officers, checking in on statuses of his Knights of Ren, reading new weapon progression reports. Aside from the clear tension - visible in Hux’s brow, and the moments in which Kylo catches him staring off into space distractedly - it feels like an ordinary day.

 

Until it comes to an end.

 

Kylo wants to leave as soon as he can - go and sulk in his quarters in peace, a hulking pile of blackness with bone-deep exhaustion and an ache in his chest. But some hidden intuition tells him to hang around, some inkling that something strange is drawing nearer and nearer. Force intuition, human intuition - he doesn’t know what to attribute it to, but without questioning it, he stays where he is.

 

With a glance up, he sees it: Hux, still in the room, looking at Kylo with eyes lost and uncertain.

 

Kylo holds his breath. Night after night, he’s seen dream-Hux look at him in every single way possible: with fear, with anger, with sadness too deep to name. Most often, he’d be on the receiving end of the look of love - soft tenderness that only comes out around white silk sheets and lips on damp skin. But that wasn’t _this_ Hux. He’s not prepared for the real Hux to look at him with anything other than lip-curling apathy. Not _this_ , this expression of searching for an answer when he doesn’t even know the question to begin with.

 

“General Hux,” Kylo says, quiet and calm. “What is it?”

 

Hux blinks, brought back to awareness from another moment spacing out. He looks away, cheeks flushing with sudden embarrassment, and Kylo sees him swallow nervously. “Nothing, it’s just-” Hux stutters, and then freezes.

 

And he has that look on his face again. The one from the conference room, after Kylo confessed his dreams were running rampant and causing him to slowly descend into madness - like he almost knows what Kylo’s getting at, like he’s been through it before himself, but so long ago that his mind barely remembers the shape of it. Only now, the look stays: the eyes searching, the mouth hanging open, frozen in time as he gets hung up on something that he just can’t drag through the mud to the forefront.

 

And then it _grows,_  into a look of _realization_ , as if he’s found it. And Kylo, with a catch in his chest, thinks of Hux with a baby in his arms, Hux with sunlight falling across his neck and Hux replacing Kylo's name with _love_ , and that maybe the universe has changed its mind.

 

He meets Kylo’s eyes once more.

 

“I had a dream,” Hux says at last.

**Author's Note:**

> if you liked this, make sure to check out my other writing on here, or give me a follow over on tumblr @begforyourmercy :)


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